"After years of focusing on further improving KDE4 two weeks ago the developers of the free desktop announced the next big step for their project: KDE Frameworks 5.0. But as long-time developer - and Plasma team leader - Aaron Seigo points out in an interview with derStandard.at/web, the source-incompatible changes shall be held to a minimum. Also calls Frameworks 5.0 only the "first step", new Applications and Workspace releases are to follow later, Seigo goes on to talk about the chances in the mobile market with Plasma Active and further areas of collaboration with the other big free desktop: GNOME."

I believe Aaron Seigo "vision" is killing KDE. Plasma in the end, does nothing like was initially told it would, as most users simply do not use activities, plasmoids or even that terrible netbook shell version.

I hope KDE community, as a whole, things better what they want for KDE 5 before entering again in all those "we will rock" sites like plasma and solid did in pre 4.0 era and end up with something that do not have a clear path.

Also, if plasma was meant to give a long life to KDE, why is that KDE 5 is being announce before a Qt5 (that would require API breaking)?

I don't know, I simply do not care anymoure about KDE development, I run it as my defaul DE, but I simply do not use any of its features, not even the menu (just a quick launch widget for my most importants apps, but KDE3 also did that, and was much more faster).

I believe Aaron Seigo "vision" is killing KDE. Plasma in the end, does nothing like was initially told it would, as most users simply do not use activities, plasmoids or even that terrible netbook shell version. I hope KDE community, as a whole, things better what they want for KDE 5 before entering again in all those "we will rock" sites like plasma and solid did in pre 4.0 era and end up with something that do not have a clear path. Also, if plasma was meant to give a long life to KDE, why is that KDE 5 is being announce before a Qt5 (that would require API breaking)? I don't know, I simply do not care anymoure about KDE development, I run it as my defaul DE, but I simply do not use any of its features, not even the menu (just a quick launch widget for my most importants apps, but KDE3 also did that, and was much more faster).

If you don't use its advanced features, then it is essentially no different on the surface (the UI) to other desktops such as XFCE. Except of course that underneath the UI KDE4 has the abstraction layers Phonon and Solid which provide applications with a more stable API than any that XFCE provides. Except of course that it provides a better environment under which to run KDE apps and Qt apps and an equivalent environment under which to run GTK apps compared to XFCE. Oh, and except of course that the KDE Software Collection, as a whole, is far far in advance of the XFCE default application set.

Since, if you don't use its advanced features, it is superficially no different to other desktops, except that it has better desktop applications (Dolphin, Okular, Gwenview, K3B et al), why not simply run it and enjoy it as such? Why do you feel a need to complain about it, and risk having rocks thrown at you, simply because it does in fact have advanced features which you don't happen to use?

Why not simply let advanced users use the advanced features, and be done with it? Live and let live.

KDE3 is not faster than KDE4, BTW, in fact KDE4 can use GPU hardware acceleration, such that it can even run on low-powered mobile phones and tablets using OpenGL ES. Also bear in mind that KDE3 relies on some technologies which are defunct and no longer supported, such as Qt3 and aRts.

Well I would bash KDE 4 but its flaws should be obvious enough to anyone that tires to run it on slower hardware (anything without opengl support or anything with a slow CPU or lack of ram)

KDE 3.x was good and I like Trinity desktop alot.... e17 and accociated libraries probably blow it away in the performance aspect and I hope that KDE 5 looks toward that direction and leaves all this nonsense behind.

Well I would bash KDE 4 but its flaws should be obvious enough to anyone that tires to run it on slower hardware (anything without opengl support or anything with a slow CPU or lack of ram) KDE 3.x was good and I like Trinity desktop alot.... e17 and accociated libraries probably blow it away in the performance aspect and I hope that KDE 5 looks toward that direction and leaves all this nonsense behind.

This is all mere unsupported allegation. I run KDE4 on a recent but low-end, under-powered, low-RAM netbook, and it runs just fine. I have encountered no hardware that used to run KDE3 well that cannot now run KDE4 just as well.

Indeed there may well be old hardware out there with no GPU, a slow CPU and a lack of RAM ... but such hardware will not run ANY recent full-featured OS well. If you have such hardware you have no hope of running KDE4, GNOME, Windows 7, Mac OSX Lion or whatever on it, something like Puppy Linux is probably your only choice.

My question for you is this: why is an observation that there happen to be some older machines still out there which will not run KDE4, GNOME, XFCE, Windows 7 or Mac OSX well in any way a valid criticism of KDE4 in particular?

KDE4 (I have version 4.6 installed) is still heavy on resources. I have a rather new laptop which can run KDE at a reasonable speed (still Compiz offers a smoother experience) but I don't use KDE in my daily work simply because I like the laptop to run cool and quiet.

Besides, OP (protomank) didn't question the usefulness of lower level abstraction layers (APIs) - these generally work well and are only a concern to developers anyway.

What he said is that Plasma is an overkill and doesn't really add much value, yet it takes valuable resources (of both developers and users). I couldn't agree more - every time I attempt using KDE4 I end up disabling 90% of effects and more obnoxious features and themes. That makes the environment quite usable but it raises a question why developing a panel, a couple of applets and still not very good menu and desktop search system, has to take so much time and CPU power. And why do I have to invest a better part of an hour or two to get it to what should be a default state for most users.

At the end of the day the only thing I want to do on my PC is running my applications and accessing my data. A desktop should make these tasks easy but other than that it should stay in the background as much as possible. The last thing I want is a desktop-star, continuously taking my attention from productive work to its bells and whistles.

That makes the environment quite usable but it raises a question why developing a panel, a couple of applets and still not very good menu and desktop search system, has to take so much time and CPU power.

That is simply the nature of trying to track all information on the system - from the meta data to file names etc as you have to index, decode, etc all that information at least the first time.

Then again, you can also turn that indexing functionality off and not bother with it.

And why do I have to invest a better part of an hour or two to get it to what should be a default state for most users.

KDE 4 - especially KDE 4.6 - is very usable right out of the box. I use it on both Kubuntu 11.04 and Gentoo installations, on systems that are several years old and even keep quite a few of the effects turned on. The laptop I'm writing this from now (vintage 2008) has nearly all effects turned on; my systems at home not so much but still quite a few effects (they're considerably older - vintage 2003 and 2005).

Now I really like Plasma. I've never had much use for virtual desktops, but Activities make sense to me - I've got 4 going now.

Compared to using KDE3, KDE4 is a very different experience that really takes on a different mindset of working if you want to really get the use out of it. But, as of 4.5 or 4.6, if you really just want something like KDE3, then just turn off the indexing, set your desktop workspace to the Desktop folder, and you're good to go - virtual desktops and all.

Compared to using KDE3, KDE4 is a very different experience that really takes on a different mindset of working if you want to really get the use out of it. But, as of 4.5 or 4.6, if you really just want something like KDE3, then just turn off the indexing, set your desktop workspace to the Desktop folder, and you're good to go - virtual desktops and all.

One caveat ... in KDE4, everything on the desktop (panels, icons, little applets, menus, links folder views, the taskbar, even the wallpaper) ... everything is a "widget".

The default behaviour of virtual desktops is that all virtual desktops shown the same configuration of widgets. So, if you want to have different wallpaper on different desktops, as you could have with KDE3, then in KDE4 you need to set one setting to its non-default state.

Right click on the desktop pager icon, then select "Pager Settings". Click on the "Virtual desktops" tab. Check the box "Different widgets for each desktop".

This non-default setting will allow you to have different wallpaper on different Virtual Desktops. In fact, if you like "icons on the desktop", you can set the desktop layout to folder view, and you can also now make each desktop folder view use a different folder. This way you can have a completely different set of icons, shortcuts, links and files on each virtual desktop.

This is a very simple way to start getting into the power of KDE4 "activities" without changing much at all of the way you have used desktops until now.

... How? Seriously, we want to know how you can cram a full DE onto a machine like that. Is the start time the usual 20 second wait? Longer even? Does the kickoff menu take half a minute to pop up? Does X keel over and die all the time?

I'm not trying to troll here, honest. It's just that I've never seen KDE4 being anything other than a pig, especially with startup times. It does in fact use a little less RAM than KDE3, but lower RAM usage is not the be all and end all of performance. So if you know a way of making KDE4 usable on really low-end machines like your Pentium II, please, don't clam up about it!

... How? Seriously, we want to know how you can cram a full DE onto a machine like that. Is the start time the usual 20 second wait? Longer even? Does the kickoff menu take half a minute to pop up? Does X keel over and die all the time?

I think the poster to which you are replying was being sarcastic. Apparently it went right over your head.

I'm not trying to troll here, honest. It's just that I've never seen KDE4 being anything other than a pig, especially with startup times. It does in fact use a little less RAM than KDE3, but lower RAM usage is not the be all and end all of performance. So if you know a way of making KDE4 usable on really low-end machines like your Pentium II, please, don't clam up about it!

Now it is you who are being sarcastic. I have never had KDE4 take more than 15 seconds (not counting the time it takes to enter a login password) to start, from pressing the power on switch all the way to a fully operational desktop, even on my 1GHz, 1GB shared video memory low end netbook machine.

The last time I ran Windows 7 on this same low-end machine, Widows 7 said there were updates (service pack 1 apparently), so I downloaded them before I switched off the machine. I took ages and ages to switch off, so I just assumed that Windows 7 had installed the updates during that switch-off sequence.

Silly me. I had occasion to use Windows 7 earlier this evening, and when I selected Windows 7 to boot from the Grub menu, I was surprised to see that it was installing the new updates. It took over an hour, including three re-boots, until I eventually got to a usable Windows desktop. Now that, my friend, is a pig of a performance if ever I saw one.

Fifteen seconds maximum for KDE4 to boot, compared to over an hour worst case (so far) for Windows 7, on the same hardware. Wow, that is just incredible. I wouldn't have believed it until I saw it for myself.

... How? Seriously, we want to know how you can cram a full DE onto a machine like that. Is the start time the usual 20 second wait? Longer even? Does the kickoff menu take half a minute to pop up? Does X keel over and die all the time?

I'm not trying to troll here, honest. It's just that I've never seen KDE4 being anything other than a pig, especially with startup times. It does in fact use a little less RAM than KDE3, but lower RAM usage is not the be all and end all of performance. So if you know a way of making KDE4 usable on really low-end machines like your Pentium II, please, don't clam up about it!

I never really timed it but from $startx to a working responsive working desktop about 35-45 secs, its takes a bit for apps to start up yes, but when they do there is no big delay or lag. And yes I do use alot of swap avg about 1.5gb of swap usage. BTW I used Arch and Slackware as the distros.

Yeah sure... your netbook has a GPU and either a 1.6Ghz single or dual core cpu and at least 512Mb ram... perhaps you should reread my post KDE3 does run on alot crappyier hardware hardware that is is respectively also a lot cheaper and energy efficient.

lemur2 ... sigh clearly you have no idea who you are talking to and the lengths I will go to run run what I like KDE 3.5 on Gentoo on an 800Mhz Crusoe runs nicely with jumanji as my browser or opera. It has some opengl acceleration but its pretty minimal.

I find it a valid critisism because there is no reason many of the features of KDE4 cannot run on older hardware... I triple boot XP, Gentoo and svn builds of Haiku OS on the subnotbook I was referring to and the latter has lots of impressive features that even KDE4 lacks like window stacking and tiling that makese sense super fast file searches that doens't bog everything down with nepomunk and clucene based text searches that are also impressively fast.

KDE 3.5 is nice and I like it but I would have liked to have seen an IMPROVEMENT without degradation in performance and no it wasn't too much to expect KDE developers themselves have as time passes even fixed some of the performance regressions they have introduced like the data base backends for plasma I believe it was was quite io bound for no real reason things like that add up massivly especially in a huge project like KDE and throwing cycles or disk io at a problem is not a solution.

I'm using a more powerful machine than any of these mentioned and while the performance is satisfactory the the window manager, menu etc. do not run as smoothly as in Gnome2 with Compiz. Yet KDE manages to drain the battery and spin the fan faster than any other desktop.

That would be fine if lower performance was compensated with a better user experience but for variety of reasons I feel KDE is worse in this regard than both Gnome2 and XFCE. KDE definitely has potential, I think it is just lacking a person or a company that would do to it what Ubuntu did to Gnome2.

That's not FUD - we just have different experiences or expectations. I'm using a more powerful machine than any of these mentioned and while the performance is satisfactory the the window manager, menu etc. do not run as smoothly as in Gnome2 with Compiz. Yet KDE manages to drain the battery and spin the fan faster than any other desktop. That would be fine if lower performance was compensated with a better user experience but for variety of reasons I feel KDE is worse in this regard than both Gnome2 and XFCE. KDE definitely has potential, I think it is just lacking a person or a company that would do to it what Ubuntu did to Gnome2.

I am using a less powerful machine than most of them ... specifically it has a 1.0 GHz AMD C-50 Ontario APU, and just 1GB of RAM (shared between the CPU and internal GPU).

It runs KDE4 just great. I do not use proprietary graphics drivers, I use the open source drivers from Xorg. There are no issues with fan speed, heat or battery drain. I get about five to six hours use per charge out of an ordinary netbook-class six cell battery. This performance is entirely comparable to Windows 7 on the same machine.

Frankly speaking I have a hard time believing that with desktop effects enabled this hardware "runs KDE4 just great". I wouldn't go that far to accuse you of spreading FUD but I think our understanding of the word "great" is vastly different.

What I said is based on my observations only. Perhaps our experiences are different, if so - good for you, but that doesn't make my critique invalid, nor your observations universal.

FYR, in my case (2 core Intel i5@2.66GHz + GeForce 310M tested with both OS and nVidia drivers) KDE4.6 runs "OK'ish". Slightly less smooth than Compiz (both with very minimal sets of effects) but the speed is satisfactory for daily use. However, KDE4 (either kwin or some background services) makes this PC quite a bit hotter, which is a show stopper for me (it would be acceptable on a workstation but not on a laptop).

Frankly speaking I have a hard time believing that with desktop effects enabled this hardware "runs KDE4 just great". I wouldn't go that far to accuse you of spreading FUD but I think our understanding of the word "great" is vastly different.

It works better and snappier than Windows 7 on the same machine.

I have full desktop effects enabled, I have a perfectly smooth "desktop cube" animation effect for switching virtual desktops, I can use either Xrender or OpenGL for the desktop effects rendering engine. If I set the special desktop effect "Show FPS" I observe a reading of 60 fps kwin rendering most of the time, occasionally dropping down to 55 fps when something happens.

What I said is based on my observations only. Perhaps our experiences are different, if so - good for you, but that doesn't make my critique invalid, nor your observations universal.

FYR, in my case (2 core Intel i5@2.66GHz + GeForce 310M tested with both OS and nVidia drivers) KDE4.6 runs "OK'ish". Slightly less smooth than Compiz (both with very minimal sets of effects) but the speed is satisfactory for daily use. However, KDE4 (either kwin or some background services) makes this PC quite a bit hotter, which is a show stopper for me (it would be acceptable on a workstation but not on a laptop).

Au contraire, the fact that KDE4 works as well as it does on my low-power, 1Ghz CPU, 1GB memory (shared between the CPU and the video graphics), shows that KDE4 itself is not slow, nor does it heat up machines. KDE4 is capable of great performance on very modest hardware. This is the way it is supposed to perform, and that it can perform if the underlying supporting system is correct.

If KDE4 does not achieve good performance on your hardware, then there is something wrong with your machine's software stack "underneath" KDE4. KDE4 is exposing some problem with your machine's graphics stack.

If KDE4 itself was broken, then no-one would get good performance from it.

In my opinion, if its needed to use graphic accel for displaying a UI, then design is failed miserably in the first place. The prettiest, most minimalistic, most effective wm I have used in my life is awesomewm.
With bash terminal as file manager, nothing beats it, when it comes to speed, versatility etc.

Im using the same setup on my quad core as on low powered computers. Totally awesome, never going to look back at kde and gnome ++ again. Its very keyboard-based though, but thats much much faster than mousing around.

I hope more people discover the benefits of a tiling wm, although such a setup will probably not be for everyone since it require some configuration and a little time spent personalizing it, but when done, you basically have one conf file you can move around and use it on the computer you like. awesomewm <3
The majority will probably always want their food prechewed and use win7 or some other mainstream piece of c.. eh .. cake, where customization and personalizing is barely possible.

I believe Aaron Seigo "vision" is killing KDE. Plasma in the end, does nothing like was initially told it would, as most users simply do not use activities, plasmoids or even that terrible netbook shell version.

Totally, and most users simply hate those "visionary" features too.

I hope KDE community, as a whole, things better what they want for KDE 5 before entering again in all those "we will rock" sites like plasma and solid did in pre 4.0 era and end up with something that do not have a clear path.

Also, if plasma was meant to give a long life to KDE, why is that KDE 5 is being announce before a Qt5 (that would require API breaking)?

Rightly said, KDE is not there to make a great Linux Desktop or to solve the problems users are facing or to make a real productive open source desktop instead KDE is by all means an advertisement for QT toolkit sales.
And now to sell QT5, it needs a bigger advertisement, so here come KDE 5 advertisement.

I don't know, I simply do not care anymoure about KDE development, I run it as my defaul DE, but I simply do not use any of its features, not even the menu (just a quick launch widget for my most importants apps, but KDE3 also did that, and was much more faster).

and no prize to guess why users in KDE use firefox or chrome or opera and openoffice or libreoffice suite!

Rightly said, KDE is not there to make a great Linux Desktop or to solve the problems users are facing or to make a real productive open source desktop instead KDE is by all means an advertisement for QT toolkit sales.

I believe Aaron Seigo "vision" is killing KDE. Plasma in the end, does nothing like was initially told it would, as most users simply do not use activities, plasmoids or even that terrible netbook shell version.

I would agree that a lot of the new interface ideas didn't really catch on. But that was never what Plasma was really about - it was about modernizing the desktop, making sure it would be maintainable, flexible, throwing out a bunch of junky code, and making it easy to add new features/ports when wanted. In that, Plasma has succeeded.

I hope KDE community, as a whole, things better what they want for KDE 5 before entering again in all those "we will rock" sites like plasma and solid did in pre 4.0 era and end up with something that do not have a clear path.

KDE 5 is simply a cleanup version of all the new stuff that got added in KDE 4 so there will be no "we will rock" sites. This has already been decided, and everyone agreed with it.

Also, if plasma was meant to give a long life to KDE, why is that KDE 5 is being announce before a Qt5 (that would require API breaking)?

It's not. KDE5 will depend on Qt5, which has already been announced.

I don't know, I simply do not care anymoure about KDE development, I run it as my defaul DE, but I simply do not use any of its features, not even the menu (just a quick launch widget for my most importants apps, but KDE3 also did that, and was much more faster).

Fair enough, but you should at least try to educate yourself before you start spouting off about it.

I believe Aaron Seigo "vision" is killing KDE. Plasma in the end, does nothing like was initially told it would, as most users simply do not use activities, plasmoids or even that terrible netbook shell version.

plasma-netbook is awesome! Ok, so you have to manually add a taskbar to really make it awesome, but it works extremely well on small screens (like palmtops) or low-resolution screens (like SDTV). It even works decently on an eeePC 701 (except that one of the updates to the Intel video driver made it flicker all the time).

I believe Aaron Seigo "vision" is killing KDE. Plasma in the end, does nothing like was initially told it would

What won't it do?

as most users simply do not use activities, plasmoids or even that terrible netbook shell version.

Most users? where do you get that impression? Oh, I see, you mean YOU don't use. What kind of ego does one have to believe that he represents everyone?[

I hope KDE community, as a whole, things better what they want for KDE 5 before entering again in all those "we will rock" sites like plasma and solid did in pre 4.0 era and end up with something that do not have a clear path.

Well, they have a vision, and I would say a quite clear one. Do you have one?

Also, if plasma was meant to give a long life to KDE, why is that KDE 5 is being announce before a Qt5 (that would require API breaking)?

What are you smoking?

I don't know, I simply do not care anymoure about KDE development, I run it as my defaul DE, but I simply do not use any of its features, not even the menu (just a quick launch widget for my most importants apps, but KDE3 also did that, and was much more faster).

I don;t know, why would someone always say something as if he was an expert but actually sounded like he knows nothing?

Oh, by the way, I am not really a "community" member, but I do wish them good luck, because they are the real explorers. I am sure they would need some CONSTRUCTIVE critics, but not some empty whining.

No, that is just the parent poster revealing he is a clueless troll. Obviously you and every user of a KDE4 desktop uses plasmoids. Kind of hard not to, since even the rather simple default KDE4 desktop are something like 5-7 plasmoids.

KDE 5 is not the "next big thing". It's the "next little thing". It is not planned to be the same type of complete overhaul as 4.0 was. It simply looks like a good excuse to get rid of some old API/ABI stuff that has been retained for compatibility reasons, and better integration between Qt and KDE. That's about it. Everything else looks to be incremental changes the same as you get between minor versions.

Such a rush to go to the next major version...
Wouldn't it be nice if they could slow down and make minor improvements not to mention get some parts of KDE useable for more people (Kontact/Kolab/Groupware). I'm still stuck using Thunderbird and it's addressbook/LDAP. Like the first comment on here, I don't fool around much with what I get by default but would really like to use "more" of KDE as my example shows. Nothing wrong with having all the customization etc, doesn't get in my road at all. KDE is still my preferred DE, has been since KDE 1x.

The KDE major versions follow the QT major versions, in this case it's basically going to be KDE 4.x continued on QT5. So why are we seeing QT5 so fast? One word: Wayland.

I do wish they'd get someone remotely sane to clean up the various settings dialogs into something more cohesive, having to go to 3-4 completely different sets of dialogs to tweak the look of my desktop is just silly

The KDE major versions follow the QT major versions, in this case it's basically going to be KDE 4.x continued on QT5. So why are we seeing QT5 so fast? One word: Wayland.

I do wish they'd get someone remotely sane to clean up the various settings dialogs into something more cohesive, having to go to 3-4 completely different sets of dialogs to tweak the look of my desktop is just silly

It sure will. Maybe KDE applications will stop flicker, once and for all. Supposedly (i read in a qt blog long ago) qt4 would stop all (most) flickering to occur, but i'm still seeing a lot of it in KDE. Especially without desktop effects masking it with effects such as fade and whatnot, but it's still there.
Maybe it's an oversight on the part of KDE devs, i really don't know because GTK/Compiz seems pretty solid in this regard though...
Before anyone yells, i'm not seeing it here on my system, then just let me add i'm quite sensitive to these kind of things. Maybe i should eat less carrots (which are said to be good for visual accuracy), LOL.

That is the software that I have been waiting for ages. One that will allow me to poo and pee at the same time, while clicking an icon. The other day I just had shitted myself allover using Gnome Shell.

Running Fedora 15 with KDE 4.6 on my notebook for 1 month. Man, it took some time, but Activities combined with Widgets really seems to be good thing. It feels like I'm using a very advanced system. I have to tweak it a little but now everything runs smooth. Seigo is a very talent developer.

Running Fedora 15 with KDE 4.6 on my notebook for 1 month. Man, it took some time, but Activities combined with Widgets really seems to be good thing. It feels like I'm using a very advanced system. I have to tweak it a little but now everything runs smooth. Seigo is a very talent developer.

Indeed. Once you understand the concept, KDE4 widgets, virtual desktops and activities is a means to arrange a desktop however you like, including wallpaper, shortcuts, URLs to websites, access to particular folders and/or files, whatever (including anything at all you could do with a KDE3 desktop) ... and save that arrangement as a named "activity". One can have as many named and saved activities as one wants, and one can load a given activity on to any given virtual desktop at one's whim.

This makes it possible to have any number of desktop configurations, all accessible at any instant, each of which is optimised just how you like it for doing a particular task. You don't have to use this capability, but it is there if you want it.

There is no other contemporary desktop available with this power and flexibility. None.

If you want ratpoison's feature set, there AFAIK is no real alternative to ratpoison. It is absolutely great for those who want to completely escape the WIMP paradigm.

Back on the actual topic of this thread: If OTOH you are trying to claim that KDE3 was the be all and end all of GUI desktops and that the KDE team should have stuck with that, then we have an entirely different argument. There is not one single actual benefit of KDE3, KDE4 does every thing that KDE3 ever did, it can perform just as well on the same hardware, it uses no deprecated out-of-development supporting software, and it has additional advanced capabilities which make it by far the most advanced desktop environment.

"Running Fedora 15 with KDE 4.6 on my notebook for 1 month. Man, it took some time, but Activities combined with Widgets really seems to be good thing. It feels like I'm using a very advanced system. I have to tweak it a little but now everything runs smooth. Seigo is a very talent developer.

Indeed. Once you understand the concept, KDE4 widgets, virtual desktops and activities is a means to arrange a desktop however you like, including wallpaper, shortcuts, URLs to websites, access to particular folders and/or files, whatever (including anything at all you could do with a KDE3 desktop) ... and save that arrangement as a named "activity". One can have as many named and saved activities as one wants, and one can load a given activity on to any given virtual desktop at one's whim.

This makes it possible to have any number of desktop configurations, all accessible at any instant, each of which is optimised just how you like it for doing a particular task. You don't have to use this capability, but it is there if you want it.

There is no other contemporary desktop available with this power and flexibility. None. "

Hi,
It would be better if after the default installation of Linux with KDE, there should be a friendly wizard to setup activities and access them in a way that even a noob can understand. For me, even a poweruser have a hard time understanding how to configure KDE's activities( maybe the lack of time for searching docs).
Okay, KDE I think I will be using for my next desktop, also the future of Unity looks promising because of third party support coming in.

Indeed. Once you understand the concept, KDE4 widgets, virtual desktops and activities is a means to arrange a desktop however you like, including wallpaper, shortcuts, URLs to websites, access to particular folders and/or files, whatever (including anything at all you could do with a KDE3 desktop) ... and save that arrangement as a named "activity". One can have as many named and saved activities as one wants, and one can load a given activity on to any given virtual desktop at one's whim.

This makes it possible to have any number of desktop configurations, all accessible at any instant, each of which is optimised just how you like it for doing a particular task. You don't have to use this capability, but it is there if you want it.

There is no other contemporary desktop available with this power and flexibility. None.

Well yes, this does sound very nice... except that when coupled with the fairly crash-happy Plasma experience, slow kwin, general configuration clunkiness, obnoxious plasma/Qt4-window widgets theme mismatchets, weird index services and a far too talkative notification area, it all tends to get too bloated, complex and shaky to be worth it. I've tried this so many times but in the end it probably took me more time to set things up than it did getting tired of it, which makes me sad. I loved KDE 2 and 3 back in the day but *for me*, 4 never lived up to its hype and promises.

URLs on the desktop, really?

I really like many KDE apps but the overall desktop experience just isn't great.

I have to wonder about the people claiming KDE4 is too heavy. I've run KDE4 on several desktops with no more than 512MB of RAM and about 1GHz CPUs with no acceleration and it works fine. Heck, I've installed openSUSE with KDE4 in a virtual machine with 256MB of RAM. It was a bit sluggish, but it worked.

It makes me wonder if the "KDE is bloated" crowd are trolling or just have unusual configurations or driver/hardware problems. KDE is pretty light and flexible in my experience.

I have to wonder about the people claiming KDE4 is too heavy. I've run KDE4 on several desktops with no more than 512MB of RAM and about 1GHz CPUs with no acceleration and it works fine. Heck, I've installed openSUSE with KDE4 in a virtual machine with 256MB of RAM. It was a bit sluggish, but it worked.

It makes me wonder if the "KDE is bloated" crowd are trolling or just have unusual configurations or driver/hardware problems. KDE is pretty light and flexible in my experience.

Likewise. KDE4 has worked for me very well on every machine I have installed it on. Admittedly this represents only about a dozen or so different machines, but nevertheless I have still had 100% success rate.

Everything started going downhill when they released KDE3. Aaron Seigo's vision is killing us. And now, Linux 3.0? Get out of here. I'm still running 2.0.40 on my VAX box. Portability? I jerryrigged my Selectric to act as a 20 baud terminal emulator via CB radio. Just hook it up to my lead acid and I'm set.

Down with the KDE cryptofasciosocialists and their Dutch henchmen! Power to the people!

What it worries me is that, again, this release and modularity is aimed to developers, just like KDE 4 and it's pillars was aimed for developers, It would be great if they included also in the statements the user experience.

Well, since version 4.6.0 the whole experience provided by KDE improved a lot.

My pet peeve with it had been the akonadi/nepomuk/strigi on their "semantic desktop" but now, at least with kde 4.7, it is a lot easier to disable them all. (See http://userbase.kde.org/Akonadi)

Anyway, as I already said on a previous comment, many of the best programs I use are qt or kde ones so, it makes sense to use KDE as the default DE.

About the interview, Seigo spot things right. With better modularity and fine interdependency tracking it looks like KDE5 is going to be even better. Lets see if QML is really going to be that good. I am only starting to use it but, overall, I trust a lot more the KDE dev core team choices than I did.